As laptops become ever more identical on the inside, it's the stuff on the outside that now differentiates one from another.
Toshiba Satellite P775
Off to college: the (wealthy) student's laptop?
Toshiba's Satellite P775 is a good example. The key points I jotted down while putting it through its paces are not the 2GHz …

COMMENTS

Battery Life and graphics card

WTB decent laptop with battery life more than 2 hrs and with a decent graphics card....

When i started reading this post it looked good, nice processor (for a laptop), nice screen resolution etc but it looks to be useless for watching a movie on without the charger, what was Toshiba thinking?!

I swear that Nvidia's Optimus is a real serious pain...

Manufactures keep glomming on to Nvidia's Optimus but us users who chose our own operating systems are unable to utilize the nVidia chipset due to an attitude problem on nVidia's side about creating drivers to support anything other than only Windows. This narrow view is causing me and other like me to grow extremely agitated at and impatient with both nVidia and the manufactures that are using Nvidia's Optimus.

Why are the HDMI and VGA cables more at the front than back?

HDMI cables tend to be thick and inflexible, and sticking it near the front just wastes space on anyones desk. Connectors of heavy, thick, inflexible devices should be to the rear.

I hope the power plug is a 90 degree bend job. Straight-out pins just beg to be damaged and risk damaging the power pin inside.

To get past the limited battery life, one may need to buy an external power pack (I use one from Stiger) that feeds the machine via the mains plug pin. Then, if the laptop allows, remove the dead battery and plug in a fresh one.... wait, that works only if one HAS a 2nd battery and only if the laptop won't shut down, AND only if one has an external battery charger so the fresh battery is not depriving the depleted one of a charge point....

Shiny Display, Windows 7

What on earth could a student do with it? I mean Windows 7 doesn't come with Latex, so there is no way of generating paper documents. It also doesn't come with an SSH-client or X11 so you cannot even log into the computer at the university.

What about Linux?

University hardly a Challenge?

I beg to differ, in my own personal experience, a lot of Uni students (particularly CS majors) appreciate portability and battery life, rather than luggability and mains tethering.

I guess other majors might beg to differ, especially if most of their studying is done using pen & paper, but unless the grant also commands a set of wheels, this one is going to remain a foldable desktop.

Dell v Toshiba

Last Dell notebook I had became unusable because the "wrist pad" blow the keyboard was so hot it could be used to fry eggs.

Compared to my old Toshiba Satellite which was my weapon of choice during the first half of my degree which behaved impeccably (and still works to this day, gets fired up every now and then for a game of Higgins Snooker / PGA 386 / Lemmings).

If I was doing it all over again I would use my Acer Aspire One with a 6 cell battery which triple boots 3 OSs, offers portability between classes/library/tutorials/labs/halls. Was also cheap (self-funded) so as not to eat into the beer and rent fund.

with that money...

Um.

Compare like to like. The graph is completely useless and biased as it NEVER compares the same two laptops at the same time. Note to author: when you compare systems, keep the same systems compared to and don't keep changing them for different test.